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Not All Shopping Carts Created Equal

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Like many web developers, I often get asked if I can install or configure a website to do e-commerce. Since most business really want to sell you something, I usually end up installing and configuring an Open Source solution like oscommerce. Because it's free, available on most cpanel installations, and has a huge community of contributors, I pick it first for client projects.

This time the scenario is a bit different, I wanted to launch one of my own sites, and didn't want to use oscommerce. Whether or not that turned out to be a good decision is yet to be seen, but I can tell you one thing, and that's that not all Open Source Shopping carts are created equal.

My first attempt was to use OpenCart, which I chose to start with because I liked the out of the box design. Simple, well organized and the admin, from what I saw in the demo, was really easy to use. After installing it and giving it a go, I ultimately stopped using it because I couldn't get the darn paypal module to work. If that would have worked the way I expected it to, you wouldn't be reading this now, I'd be happily off selling stickers to the world.

So then I switched to Zen-Cart and quickly discovered that it's no different than what I was already using with oscommerce, it's built upon the same engine. Basically what turns me off from these two systems, is how hard it is to style and climb your way through the mess of code.

So two down and few more to go, but at this point I think I'm just going to build my own and use some fancy jQuery stuff to build the "basket" technology that I so desperately want. There are a few take aways from the interface of both of these systems that I really liked, but in the end the results they produced didn't give me what I was looking for. So it's off to see if I can build my own.

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